20 Famous Brands That Began As Family Businesses Before 1900

Arthur Guinness, an Irish brewer, signed a lease in 1759 on a site at St. James’s Gate in Dublin that would run for 9,000 years. He eventually gave up brewing ordinary ale to brew only dark porter stout, and under his grandson, the brewery grew to become the largest in the world. Somehow, the lease is still running.

Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant who had come to America with his brothers to sell dry goods in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, was supplying fabric to Jacob Davis, a Reno tailor who was using copper rivets to reinforce miners’ pants at the points of greatest strain. In 1872, Davis wrote to Strauss proposing that they share the patent. But Davis didn’t have the money to pay the $68 fee for the application. So Strauss did. The two were awarded the patent in 1873.

In 1837, Thierry Hermès opened a Paris workshop producing harnesses and bridles for the horses of Europe’s nobility. His firm moved to its current Paris address in 1880, but when cars began replacing horse-drawn carriages, his grandson Émile-Maurice Hermès put the family’s leatherworking expertise to work on luggage and handbags, and won the exclusive French rights to the zipper after the First World War. The saddle shop was now a fashion house.

In 1824, John Cadbury, a Quaker grocer, opened a shop in Birmingham selling tea, coffee, and drinking chocolate, promoting cocoa as an anti-alcoholic beverage. Richard and George, his sons, built the brand up with a new Dutch-style cocoa press. Then, from 1879, they constructed Bournville, a model garden village with green parks and attractive houses for their employees. Dairy Milk came even later, in 1905.

After making a fortune buying and selling coins and credit in Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto, Mayer Amschel Rothschild became a financial agent to a German prince in 1769. He set up his five sons in five European capitals, Nathan in London and James in Paris, all connected by a fast private courier service. A myth has it that Nathan got rich by learning of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo before anyone else. But his accounts show him underwriting government bonds for decades across the network, which later generations would use to help finance the Suez Canal.

In 1806, William Colgate, 23, opened a shop selling starch, soap, and candles on Dutch Street, Manhattan. His son Samuel then started selling scented toothpaste in glass jars. But it wasn’t until 1896 that the firm decided to package it in a collapsible metal squeeze tube, forever changing the way humans brush their teeth. From a candlemaker’s shop to a bathroom must-have, Colgate had arrived.

E.I. du Pont, a French chemist who escaped revolutionary France in 1799, purchased property on Brandywine Creek in Delaware in 1802 and set up gunpowder mills there. He constructed stone walls that faced inward and light wood structures on the side facing the river so that any blast would be directed outward. Eventually, the DuPont mills produced about 40% of the Union Army’s gunpowder in the Civil War. DuPont would eventually move from explosives into synthetic materials like nylon and Kevlar.

In 1836, while still in Germany, Henry Steinway constructed his first piano in his kitchen. Then he moved to New York, where he and his sons founded Steinway & Sons in 1853. Over the next three decades, they secured over 120 patents, including a crossed-string design and a single cast-iron frame, that reshaped how concert pianos resonate. These inventions set the standard for the rest of the industry, and many can still be found today.

In 1864, a 22-year-old Gerard Adriaan Heineken purchased an Amsterdam brewery and converted it to cold-fermented lager. Heineken really took off in 1886. Dr. Hartog Elion, a Heineken scientist who had studied under Louis Pasteur, isolated a unique yeast that produced the same taste every time. This allowed Heineken to be exported all over the world. By 1954, the Heineken family no longer held majority control of the company, until Gerard Adriaan Heineken’s grandson bought out the majority shareholders to bring it back into family hands.

The earliest surviving record owned by Beretta is a receipt, dated October 3, 1526, for 296 ducats for 185 barrels for arquebuses, an early long-barreled firearm. The company traces its origins to Bartolomeo Beretta, the barrel maker who produced them, working in the territory controlled by the Republic of Venice. He had not invented the firearm, but his family firm would go on to supply precision gun barrels to European militaries for half a millennium.

Henry Sands Brooks established a men’s clothing shop in Manhattan in 1818. Upon his death, his eldest son, Henry A. Brooks, continued to run the store on his own for another 17 years until finally turning it over to his four younger brothers in 1850, who renamed the enterprise Brooks Brothers and gave us the Golden Fleece emblem. The business went on to introduce the button-down collar and clothe Abraham Lincoln. The name familiar today took three decades to arrive.

In 1706, Thomas Twining purchased a London coffee house at 216 Strand and converted it into a tea merchant that catered to affluent clients, male and female, as most coffee houses were off-limits to women back then. His grandson Richard designed the shop’s capital letter logo and golden lion crest in 1787, and it’s still mounted above the same door. It took until 1837 for the company to receive its first royal warrant, bestowed by Queen Victoria.

The cabinetmaker Kaspar Faber began producing graphite pencils in Germany in 1761. His great-grandson Baron Lothar von Faber standardized the length of pencils, as well as the hexagonal shape that keeps them from rolling off a table. The double name came later still: In 1898, heiress Ottilie von Faber married a count named Alexander zu Castell-Rüdenhausen, combining their last names to create Faber-Castell. The jousting-knight logo came a few years later.

In 1899, engineer Carl Miele and his business partner, Reinhard Zinkann, started their appliance company in a former German grain mill, with 11 workers producing cream separators and butter churns. In 1901, Miele took that wooden churn and used it to create one of Europe’s first tub washing machines. The company continued to innovate, producing one of Europe’s first electric dishwashers in 1929.

In 1810, brothers Jean-Pierre II and Jean-Frederic Peugeot turned their family’s French grain mill into a steel foundry, producing saw blades, coffee grinders, and corset stays. In 1858, a descendant, Emile Peugeot, registered the company’s lion trademark. In the late 1880s, yet another descendant, Armand Peugeot, constructed the firm’s first steam tricycle and gasoline-powered car, and the grinder maker became the producer of the world’s oldest active car brand name.

It wasn’t until after the Civil War that a former banker called Edmund McIlhenny started growing hot peppers on Avery Island, Louisiana. He mashed them with salt, aged the mash in oak barrels, blended it with French wine vinegar, and bottled the result in repurposed cologne bottles. He patented the recipe in 1870. McIlhenny wasn’t the first Louisianan to mix peppers with vinegar, but he was the one who commercialized it. The mash is still barrel-aged on the same island today.

The Beam family’s bourbon lineage begins with Jacob Beam, a German immigrant who sold his first cask of sour-mash whiskey in Kentucky in the 1790s. When Prohibition came to a close, his descendant James Beauregard “Jim” Beam was 70 years old. He resurrected the distillery, building a new one in 120 days using the same yeast to ferment each batch. The whiskey was renamed Jim Beam about ten years later.

In 1877, Pietro Barilla Sr. started a bakery that sold bread and pasta in Parma, Italy. The next generation built an industrial pasta factory, and the next came up with the idea of selling pasta in cardboard boxes in the 1950s. In 1971, the Barillas sold the business to the American conglomerate W.R. Grace, but this deal didn’t work out, and in 1979, Pietro Barilla Jr. bought the company outright and returned it to family ownership.

Friedrich Jacob Merck purchased the Angel Pharmacy in Darmstadt in 1668. A later descendant, Emanuel Merck, converted it into an industrial chemical factory, manufacturing pure morphine in 1827. In 1891, the Mercks opened an American division. But during the First World War, the American government nationalized it, creating the completely independent Merck & Co., which split from its namesake parent in 1917. Today, the two companies, the Darmstadt-based, family-owned German Merck Group and the US-listed Merck & Co., are two different businesses.

According to the family lore, Avedis Zildjian I, an Armenian craftsman in Constantinople, was trying to make gold out of base metals by combining copper, tin, and silver in the early 1600s but produced instead a bronze that rang when struck. In reality, we know only that Avedis opened a workshop to produce Zildjian cymbals in 1623, and that in the following centuries his descendants relocated to Massachusetts and eventually produced instruments for jazz drummers such as Gene Krupa.

This content was created with the help of AI.